Various boat bumpers or fenders are known in the boating industry. These may be solid or hollow and are made from various materials. One form of a simple boat bumper is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,183,875 issued May 18, 1965 to L. E. Russell. The bumper consists of a number of hollow units held together by a rope that extends through two holes formed in each unit. Each bumper unit has a generally square cross-section and is rectangular when viewed from the top and from the side. The walls are resilient and formed of a plastic material. Each bumper unit also has an inflating valve by means of which the unit may be pneumatically inflated in a conventional manner. One difficulty with this bumper and other known boat bumpers is that they do not provide adequate protection for the corner of a boat hull such as where the side of the boat meets the boat deck. The known bumpers cannot be bent around corners.
Another marine bumper is that taught by U.S. Pat. No. 3,540,403 issued Nov. 17, 1970 to Linus E. Russell. This known bumper has a unitary construction and is made by a blow molding process. The bumper has two elongate hollow bulbous body segments that extend parallel to one another. These segments are connected together by a web which has a tube extending down the centre thereof to accommodate a line or rope. Although this bumper will bend to some extent because it is made of a resilient flexible material, the bumper could not be bent around sharp corners such as a 90 degree corner.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,286,680 dated Nov. 22, 1966 and issued to Robert Caretta discloses a boat fender made from several elongate, cylindrical bodies of resilient material. Each body has a hemi-spherical top, a cylindrical bore extending most of its length, and an open bottom defined by a rounded bottom edge. The individual units are held together by means of a rope. This rope extends through a passageway formed in the hemi-spherical top. Because of the shape of adjacent ends, the fender units will swivel to some extent relative to each other. However this known boat fender will still not provide adequate protection for the corner of a boat such as where the hull meets the boat deck. Even if two of the fender units met at such a corner, the adjacent ends of the units would tend to separate and thus leave the corner of the boat exposed.
An object of the present invention is to provide an improved bumper unit for protecting the hull of a boat.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a bumper unit having a partial cylinder at one end and a socket portion at the other end, which unit can be used in conjunction with other similar bumper units to provide a bumper that will bend around curved surfaces.